Power and Powerlessness: Brecht’s Poems to Carola Neher

This essay is a study of Brecht’s poems to Carola Neher: the two versions of ’Rat an die Schauspielerin C.N.’ (?1930, ?1956) and ’Das Waschen’ (1937). Their dating and textual authority in the three main editions of Brecht’s works are a matter of some uncertainty, but the essay suggests a sequence for them that makes sense in the overall pattern of Brecht’s life and poetry. They are analysed with two leading questions, particularly acute in the 1930s, in view: what is the nature of the poet’s authority; what is the relation of poetry to action? The ’original version’ (Elisabeth Hauptmann’s term) of the two poems of advice is read as the product of Brecht and Neher’s shared success with Die Dreigroschenoper: the poet is in command; the situation is intimate, but the mood is imperative, the gesture as invasive as it is tender; the director is instructing his leading lady how to perform ‐ exemplarily. ’Das Waschen’, written from Brecht’s exile in Dennmark to Neher in prison in Moscow, is read as the gesture of one powerless to help, but writing into the dark, as a reminder of a ‐ Brecht’s word is ’menschenwürdigere’ ‐ situation: subdued though it is, the poem carries a charge of memory and muted encouragement. The third porm, a variant of the first, is read as a retreat, lacking the purposeful authority of the first and the paradoxical power in powerlessness of the second. The poems move from celebration to reminder to wish‐fulfilment ‐ which is both less and more than Brecht sert out to require of poetry.